The Fault of Time

The first time I hiked the hill after the burn, the checkerboard of charred earth behind my grandparents’ house left sandpaper in my throat. The ponderosa pines were spindly and metallic, as if flame had turned their bark to stone. Some treetops were still green, which was good, my grandmother told me. It meant there was still life in them. Those were the ones likely to survive.

Back then I was in my early twenties. Molting my teenage invincibility had left me raw, overcalibrated to the impermanence of life. Everywhere I looked in Montana it seemed there was a body sliding toward death. The fawn stuck behind barbed wire in the neighbor’s pasture, the half-chewed chipmunk in the yard, the Parkinson’s crawling toward my grandfather’s brain. Now, skirting blackened, blown-open stumps, I tried to measure my gratitude. My grandfather, a former Forest Service biologist, had always thinned the forest around their Bitterroot Valley home. Because he had been in the hospital when my grandmother received the evacuation notice, she’d worked alone to hose down their deck furniture, then load the cat and quilts into the car.

My grandfather survived his heart surgery. Their house survived the burn.

And yet. Scrambling the trail I had climbed so many times before, I could not ignore the tiny whine inside my head: It’s unfair. I knew the fire would be generative for the forest, but I did not like what it had done to my memory of this place. I did not want to be reminded of how quickly loss could happen: that the Douglas firs, like my grandparents, would not always be there to greet me. Amidst the precarity of human life, I craved a predictable landscape. I felt betrayed when the ecosystem—my seasonal expectation of it—changed.

Why did I feel I was owed a stable wilderness, a certain snapshot of the earth? If I first believed it was a product of simple nostalgia, I now think it was a problem of visualizing time. As global warming warps what is familiar on our planet, we must confront not only immense ecological change, but the scales we have inherited to conceptualize it. So often I had looked to the natural world to measure my own life: Where was I when the daffodils bloomed last year? Who was I with during our last snow? The result was that I saw the earth only through the timescale of my own days. Now I wanted to peer beyond it. I had become skeptical of my desire for landscapes to change only in legible, routine ways. What did my body know about landscape time? Why did I let myself believe that the snapshot of ecosystem I had fallen in love with represented the land at its best?

I spent the afternoon of my last birthday walking alone on the beach. I was trying to determine the shape of a year. I did not want to see it only in relation to my own animal body—a unit of age, a net that would catch whatever shards of life had floated by. But what else was a year? Twelve pearly moons. The rings on the fish scales, the line on the box turtle’s shell. The bright-and-dark stripes in the waxlike plug of a whale’s ear.

I had been gifted a cabin for the month of October at an artist residency in southern Washington. The Long Beach Peninsula lies between the Pacific and Willapa Bay, which once drained the Columbia River and now grows nine percent of all oysters eaten in the United States. The first thing I learned about this tongue of land was that I loved it. The fluorescent purple asters crowding the tidal mudflats, the horizon of sand dune and shaggy Sitka spruce, the warblers unzipping the pink sky. I never wanted to go home. Still, chasing my awe like a dog behind a truck, there was another feeling. A jumpy, nervous dread.

Because the peninsula is so long and flat, it has made headlines as one of the worst places to be when the now overdue Cascadia earthquake erupts. The landscape around me would, without a doubt, one day transform. The trees—the shore—were not stable. Local officials recommend “vertical evacuation routes” for survival. I did not have a tower; I had an emergency backpack prepared by residency staff. Because a tsunami will first appear not as a wave but as its absence, I walked the coast with an eye to the sea. I did not fear a wall of water—by then it would be too late. I feared the Pacific rewinding itself, like a snake coiling back before it strikes. I feared what I would do if the water retracted.

The last time the Cascadia Subduction Zone ruptured, it was late January 1700. The quake, now thought to have measured around 9.0, was one of the largest in the history of North America. The shaking came as people were going to bed. The earth went liquid. The coast sunk by two meters; the Huu-ay-aht people tell of longhouses sucked into the sand. Trees were tossed through the air. It was impossible to sit and impossible to stand, the Cowichan say. Survivors tied canoes to the tops of trees. Where I was, on Willapa Bay, rings from the bone-gray pillars of a spruce and cedar ghost forest suggest that the trees died quickly. We forget a tree can be rooted to the land even as it drowns in the sea.

The night before my birthday, I dreamt the earthquake arrived. In the dream, I was at my parents’ house in Portland. A man I once dated had holed up in my childhood room with a woman I did not know. When I told him they should evacuate, he laughed. You’re always too worried, he said. Alone in the backyard, I waited for the water heater to blow. When I woke up, it was I, not the earth, that was shaking.

Though I was born in Portland, not far from the coast, I grew up oblivious to the threat of the Cascadia quake. I knew earthquakes could rattle cutlery, but I imagined my hometown immune from larger tremors. I did not know our region had seen forty-three major earthquakes in the last ten thousand years, or that the distance between them ranged from 200 to 800 years but on average was around 245. The centuries since the 1700 earthquake were not a buffer against the next one, but their accumulation had muffled the past. Unaware of our history, I was unafraid of our future. At school in the mid-2000s, even climate change seemed like a storm we might dodge. Disaster, I thought, was a problem for other places. I believed the Pacific Northwest a stable home.

It would be wrong to say my seismic ignorance was due to a gap in knowledge—it was a gap in collective listening. For many people, this land had never been predictable. The legacy of Cascadia’s earthquakes can be seen in numerous Indigenous stories, like the ones told by the Quileute and Hoh people about how, when Thunderbird and Whale fought, the mountains shook and the oceans rose. Across Willapa Bay from me, the Shoalwater Bay Tribe had recently received FEMA funding to build the country’s first freestanding tsunami tower, which could harbor up to four hundred people. After generations of stories—about the water receding, debris snagging in the tops of trees—the Tribe understood the threat. “This tower will save our lives someday,” Lynn Clark, a Shoalwater tribal council member, told a journalist at the tower’s dedication. It wasn’t until the 1980s that white scientists began to consider how Indigenous stories revealed seismology and not just myth: how the 1700 quake had occurred, not before memory itself, but simply before settler recordkeeping.

The concept of an unchanging wilderness—its panoramas predictable, its seasons unrolling like backdrops in a school play—is a fiction. A story dependent on the dismissal of Native ecological histories as legend and myth. Learning how colonial erasure had shaped my awareness of the earthquake made me confront how else settler hegemony had warped time. What landscape had I mourned on that first post-fire walk across my grandparents’ land? I did not know at the time that many of the names the Salish people gave to their land spoke of a place carved by fire; that the ecosystems Lewis and Clark described on their arrival here—flower-strewn prairies, widely spaced ponderosas—were lost long before I was born; that the forest panorama I later mourned came only after the forced removal of the Salish people and the suppression of their traditional burning practices.

It’s now been over five years since my grandparents’ land burned. Shrubs like ninebark and willow came back first, then native grasses and flowers, and eventually, new ponderosa seedlings. More snow collects on the hillsides now because with fewer trees there’s more open ground. Glutted with runoff, the creek is fuller than before. Walking the hill, my mind still juggles images of the forest panorama I once knew with the meadow that spreads around me now. But other snapshots—the pre-settler past, the distant Anthropocene future—jostle for attention too. If I once turned to the woods as a way to help myself “live in the present,” I now also look to them to practice living across time. Just as the accumulation of scars and lines on my body reveals the history of my life, so the elements of an ecosystem reveal the history of a place—if we only learn to read them.

In the beginning when I jogged the Willapa Bay estuary, toeing the salt marsh as I paused to snack on the briny snap of pickleweed, I did not know that traces of the last earthquakes were staring at me from the undulating shore; that the strata of fossilized oyster and clam shells was not only a measure of time, but story. A memory of how the land had buckled, throwing the sediment of one ecosystem into the sediment of another, but also of how the land had, eventually, stilled. Of how the salt grass and silverweed had come back to root.

It is one thing to cede a belief in a predictable landscape and another to reckon with how to hold uncertainty in one’s body or one’s day. A few years ago, not long after a catastrophic earthquake in Peru, I visited a friend’s brick apartment in Portland. It’s such a specific curse that the intervals between the Cascadia quakes are so long, she said, eying a vase sticky-taped to her mantle. There’s time to forget the horror before it happens again. I knew what she meant. Three hundred years resisted the generational timescales by which I was used to measuring and metabolizing history. It was one thing to hear stories from my grandmother’s or great-grandmother’s life, or even my great-great-grandmother’s life, but anything beyond that felt murky, like a game of telephone that had gone on too long. When I heard the word “interval,” I thought of the tempo of a musician’s metronome. Not only was the rhythm of the Cascadia fault line irregular, but the intervals were far too long. It was hard to find the song when hundreds of years passed between each beat.

My weeks on Willapa Bay convinced me I should try to visualize the breadth of time since 1700, and to practice understanding what such a span meant. Earth’s longest known living animal was Ming, an Icelandic quahog clam who had been some two hundred years old when the earthquake hit, and then survived until I was a teenager. What did three centuries feel like to a clam? Or to a tree? On an island reachable only by boat in the middle of the bay, a grove of western red cedars had stood for over a thousand years. How had they lived? To drive toward the cranberry bogs and piles of oyster shells on the peninsula was to pass a ghost forest filled with jagged columns of other cedars, dead but preserved thanks to their rot-resistant bark. The first time I drove by, I could not understand what I was looking at. What had happened to their trunks? I did not know that trees could hold memories not only of fires, but of fault lines.

Despite my fears about the quake, I moved home to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, after a decade away. I suppose I am resistant to the narrative that the future equals dread.

As a child, a babysitter had told me that twenty-six was the last birthday to celebrate. After that, she said with a sad shake of her head, it’s all downhill. I remembered her words on the eve of my twenty-sixth birthday, when they landed like a spell. So, this is it. Every year since then, I have blown out my candles and thought of how the babysitter was wrong. Because I am skilled now at accepting that every year brings me closer to death, I practice telling myself that each one brings us closer to the Cascadia earthquake too. Statistically, each year without it increases its odds of occurring in a future year. Thinking of this still makes me want to cry. I do not want the old-growth forests around me to flatten. I do not want people to die or shores to change. At the same time, it has forced me to confront what sort of change keeps me up at night. Sudden change is easier to register than quiet, chronic change. But it is an illusion to imagine that a shaking earth is scarier than a slowly warming one.

The week of my birthday, pumpkins sat on stoops surrounded by leaves that had not yet begun to redden. When I threw off my sneakers at the beach, the sand was warm. It was mid-October, and inland, summer fires were still burning. For a few days, Seattle and Portland recorded the worst air quality in the world. Newspapers told people to stay inside. Because the sky on the peninsula was blue, I sat on my porch in a T-shirt, eating a peach until my head, too, began to throb.

Collapsing onto my cabin bed, I looked at the wild blueberries outside my window and thought of the blackened hill behind my grandparents’ house. The number of people who experience extreme smoke in the American West is twenty-seven times higher than it was a decade ago, but it isn’t just the climate that’s changing; time, too, seems to be shifting. The borders we have come to expect between the seasons have slid off their axis. Hundred-year floods are happening every year. The metronome has gone awry.

I sometimes feel that it is most responsible, given the gravity of our warming future, to train my gaze down the road, away from our past. But that impulse suggests history has nothing to teach us. As if that long-ago earthquake and our distant future on Earth were irrelevant, not worth the challenge of trying to visualize. The year 2300—the date where many contemporary scientific models of climate change now stop—is not an abstraction; it’s decades closer than the 1700 quake is to us now. Imagine the people who lived on the peninsula then: the mother tucking her baby in for sleep, the girl leaning in for a goodnight kiss. The shore suddenly shaking. The ocean rolling itself back.

Three hundred years amounts to an estimated twelve generations of human life. It’s the length of time it will take for the world to reach “full gender equality” if there is no intervention, a recent UN report found. A century longer than last night’s aluminum can will live. A century shorter than the plastic loops that tether a six-pack. By 2300, the sea may be a meter higher. The Arctic Ocean without ice.

When archaeologist Alan McMillan searched for evidence of catastrophe over the last three thousand years along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts, he found a pattern of both disaster and rehabitation. “The seismic events were catastrophic but short term,” he told a journalist. Villages were destroyed; villages came back. It made me think of a line from Nastassja Martin’s memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, about life on the Kamchatka Peninsula: “Living in the forest is partly this, being a living thing among so many others, going up and down along with them.” To love the trees, to live among them, is to reconcile myself not only to my impermanence, but to theirs. To see the environment not as a backdrop, but a limb. Change is as inevitable there as in our own bodies. What is love if not the muscle that helps steady us in the face of it?

The difference between the distant future and the distant past, of course, is that future records are not frozen. The ink is still in the pen; the pen is in our reach.

A week after my birthday, a tsunami test siren rang from atop a nearby pole. We had known to expect the noise, been alerted via emails and texts that it was routine practice for the emergency system, but it was impossible not to flinch when it began. Sitting at my desk, I let myself rehearse. Because the residency was located at the safest, highest part of the peninsula, a real siren would be less a call to action then to thought—the bell on the door of a waiting room I did not want to enter. The wave would reach us or it would not.

I don’t know how much time passed. Eventually, the forest went quiet. I felt I had survived something. I wanted a snack. I was on my porch, eating a cookie and staring at the grass, when I saw a garter snake chasing a frog. I have always been scared of snakes, the sort of human who yelps after an encounter on the trail. Now, though, I stood, transfixed. It was not that I was rooting for one vertebrate or the other, but that I understood the fundamental instability of being a body in time. I felt myself the snake, and I felt myself the frog, and my heart burst as it chased itself into the shadows.

It made me think of being a child in the science museum. How I had entered a photobooth that promised to show me the future. The woman who appeared on the screen had a face of creases. She smiled when I smiled. Her eyelids drooped. I could not look away, but I did not know how to face her. She made me strangely homesick. How nice, a minute later, when I could leave the booth; to find, in a darkened window, the girl I thought I’d lost. I now see that the genius of the booth was not in how it transformed me, but in how it asked me to hold multiple selves. To glimpse in my tilting browbone the convergence of past, present, and future. To teach me how to look in a mirror—how to look at a landscape—without mistaking time for loss.